Norman Johnston was seven years old when he was carried asleep aboard a ship, bound for “a stolen childhood of degradation and abuse” in Australia.

Now, 68, he was one of thousands of Scots children sent abroad through a forced migration scheme, which has been condemned by The Independent Inquiry into Child Sexual Abuse.

The inquiry focused on England and Wales and while separate probes have been set up in Scotland and Northern Ireland, it has called for financial compensation for remaining victims, which should include any Scots.

Norman Johnston is demanding justice for the children caught up in the forced migration scheme (Image: Handout)

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In 2010, then prime minister Gordon Brown, issued an apology to victims on behalf of the UK and last year he told the inquiry, the scheme was “government-enforced trafficking”, involving sex abuse allegations on a larger scale than those levelled at Jimmy Savile.

Norman, from Aberdeen, was this week in London to hear inquiry chairwoman Professor Alexis Jay say the Government had failed to protect children and had persevered with the migrations despite evidence of wide scale abuse.

She said: “Child migration was a deeply flawed government policy that was badly implemented by numerous organisations which sent children as young as five years old abroad.

“The policy was allowed to continue despite evidence over many years showing that children were suffering.”

Although the scheme was sold as an opportunity for disadvantaged children, the reality was that it was cheaper to ship them off than care for them in British institutions.

Many were used as slave labour, subjected to unspeakable brutality and sexual abuse. Some were starved, ostracised from family life and made to sleep in outhouses.

Children from England and Wales were also sent abroad in the scheme (Image: Hulton Archive)

Scots charity Quarriers sent 7000 children to Canada, where they were dubbed the “child slaves”.

Norman, who is president of the International Association of Former Child Migrants, is demanding a meeting with Prime Minister Theresa May to discuss the Government’s role in the scandal. He said: “We want to die knowing that justice has been served.”

The inquiry heard evidence of appalling treatment of children.

The IICSA report notes a “particularly awful” incident, in which a group of 15 children in Australia faced a form of collective punishment, of being forced to watch the sadistic killing of a pet horse they loved.

Last July, Norman gave a searing account to the inquiry, outlining the brutality and injustice of the child migrant scheme.

His mother was alive when he was put in to an institution and taken abroad without parental consent.

He said: “Children were raped, children were sexually abused, children were flogged, children were starved. There was never a day I can recall where I was not hungry.”

Clontarf Aboriginal College is the current name of a former orphanage for boys operated by the Christian Brothers organisation in Perth, Australia (Image: Internet Unknown)

Norman was asleep, he believes drugged, when he was placed on a ship in Southampton, bound for Australia, and when he awoke he was at sea. He said he cried for three days.

He was sent first to a Christian Brothers’ Boys’ Home in Castledare in Western Australia

He said: “The day I arrived at Castledare, we were kicked and belted off the bus.

“From the minute we arrived, a member of the Christian Brothers got on the bus and bellowed at us to get off and get into a single line outside the bus. I remember thinking: ‘My God, what have we gotten ourselves into here?’ And it never got better from that day.”

But he said there was abuse of an even larger scale when he was sent to the Christian Brothers boys’ home of Clontarf when he was 10.

He said: “The Christian Brother would walk into our dormitory, pick one of the children up any night he felt like it, carry him to his room in the dead of the night and sexually abuse him in the room, and then carry him back into his bed before morning. This was standard practice. It was so open. We’d be sitting in class and one of the Christian Brothers would just openly abuse the children.

“We were sent to well-established paedophile rings.”

Many children were falsely told their parents were dead and some died not knowing they had siblings and family in their home countries.

It was only years later that Norman discovered he had a brother in Edinburgh. They arrived with no papers or ID, often their dates of birth and names were altered and they were left stateless, with no citizenship in their imposed new homes.

Scots charity Quarriers sent 7000 children to Canada, where they were seen as child slaves (Image: Hulton Archive)

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He said: “As a seven-year-old, I thought, ‘Wow, they said all these wonderful things about Australia, that you pick fruit off the trees on the way, that the sun shines.’ It sounded absolutely fantastic.”

Norman added that the long-term impact on migrants was devastating, adding: “We never had the belonging. We were islands in our own right.

“Many have not been able to ever fit into society. They didn’t know how to.” As well as the UK, Australia has apologised for their treatment of the home children who were sent there.

Author Sandra Joyce has written a book based on her father Robert’s experiences as a child migrant.

It was not until after his death that she discovered he had been sent to Canada but she helped secure an apology from the country’s government in February last year.

Robert and his brother Thomas, from Lochore, a mining town in Fife, had been sent across the Atlantic in 1925 when they were 15 and 12.

Sandra said: “My father was very distant — he didn’t grow up in a family so never learned how to connect emotionally.”

Children from all over Scotland were involved in the forced migration scheme (Image: Fairfax Media)

When Jim Brownwell was a member of Canada’s provincial parliament, he proposed a private member’s bill to establish September 28 as a national day for the child migrants. The bill was passed.

He chose the date because his gran, Mary Scott Pearson, was a child migrant from Glasgow who arrived in Canada on September 28, 1891.

While the relatives of the children continue the fight to make sure their voices are heard, Jim’s work has ensured that for at least one day every year the victims of abuse will be remembered.